ROS Introduction

Main concepts
Basic commands

Lecturer: Roi Yehoshua

roiyeho@gmail.com
 The Problem
• Lack of standards for robotics

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 What is ROS?
• ROS is an open-source robot operating system
• A set of software libraries and tools that help you
build robot applications that work across a wide
variety of robotic platforms
• Originally developed in 2007 at the Stanford
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and development
continued at Willow Garage
• Since 2013 managed by OSRF (Open Source Robotics
Foundation)

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 ROS Main Features
ROS has two "sides"
• The operating system side, which provides standard
operating system services such as:
– hardware abstraction
– low-level device control
– implementation of commonly used functionality
– message-passing between processes
– package management
• A suite of user contributed packages that implement
common robot functionality such as SLAM, planning,
perception, vision, manipulation, etc.

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 ROS Main Features

Taken from Sachin Chitta and Radu Rusu (Willow Garage)

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 ROS Philosophy
• Peer to Peer
– ROS systems consist of numerous small computer programs which
connect to each other and continuously exchange messages
• Tools-based
– There are many small, generic programs that perform tasks such as
visualization, logging, plotting data streams, etc.
• Multi-Lingual
– ROS software modules can be written in any language for which a
client library has been written. Currently client libraries exist for C++,
Python, LISP, Java, JavaScript, MATLAB, Ruby, and more.
• Thin
– The ROS conventions encourage contributors to create stand-alone
libraries and then wrap those libraries so they send and receive
messages to/from other ROS modules.
• Free and open source

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 ROS Wiki
• http://wiki.ros.org/
• Installation: http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Installation
• Tutorials: http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials
• ROS Tutorial Videos
– http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDC89965A56E6A8D6
• ROS Cheat Sheet
– http://www.tedusar.eu/files/summerschool2013/ROSche
atsheet.pdf

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 Robots using ROS
http://wiki.ros.org/Robots

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 ROS Core Concepts
• Nodes
• Messages and Topics
• Services
• ROS Master
• Parameters
• Stacks and packages

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 ROS Nodes
• Single-purposed executable programs
– e.g. sensor driver(s), actuator driver(s), mapper,
planner, UI, etc.
• Individually compiled, executed, and managed
• Nodes are written using a ROS client library
– roscpp – C++ client library
– rospy – python client library
• Nodes can publish or subscribe to a Topic
• Nodes can also provide or use a Service
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 ROS Topics
• A topic is a name for a stream of messages with a
defined type
– e.g., data from a laser range-finder might be sent on
a topic called scan, with a message type of LaserScan
• Nodes communicate with each other by
publishing messages to topics
• Publish/Subscribe model: 1-to-N broadcasting

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ROS Topics

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The ROS Graph

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 Fetch an Item Graph

Taken from Programming Robots with ROS (Quigley et al.)

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 ROS Messages
• Strictly-typed data structures for inter-node
communication
• For example, geometry_msgs/Twist is used to
express velocity commands:
Vector3 linear
Vector3 angular
– Vector3 is another message type composed of:
float64 x
float64 y
float64 z

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 ROS Services
• Synchronous inter-node transactions / RPC
• Service/Client model: 1-to-1 request-response
• Service roles:
– carry out remote computation
– trigger functionality / behavior
• Example:
– map_server/static_map – retrieves the current grid
map used by the robot for navigation

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 ROS Master
• Provides connection information to nodes so that
they can transmit messages to each other
– Every node connects to a master at startup to register
details of the message streams they publish, and the
streams to which that they to subscribe
– When a new node appears, the master provides it
with the information that it needs to form a direct
peer-to-peer connection with other nodes publishing
and subscribing to the same message topics

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 ROS Master
• Let’s say we have two nodes: a Camera node and an
Image_viewer node
• Typically the camera node would start first notifying
the master that it wants to publish images on the
topic "images":

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 ROS Master
• Now, Image_viewer wants to subscribe to the topic
"images" to see if there's maybe some images there:

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 ROS Master
• Now that the topic "images" has both a publisher and a
subscriber, the master node notifies Camera and
Image_viewer about each others existence, so that they
can start transferring images to one another:

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 Parameter Server
• A shared, multi-variate dictionary that is
accessible via network APIs
• Best used for static, non-binary data such as
configuration parameters
• Runs inside the ROS master

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 ROS Packages
• Software in ROS is organized in packages.
• A package contains one or more nodes and
provides a ROS interface
• Most of ROS packages are hosted in GitHub

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 ROS Package System

Taken from Sachin Chitta and Radu Rusu (Willow Garage)

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ROS Distribution Releases

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 ROS Supported Platforms
• ROS is currently supported only on Ubuntu
– other variants such as Windows and Mac OS X are considered
experimental (will be supported on ROS 2.0)
• ROS distribution supported is limited to <=3 latest
Ubuntu versions
• ROS Jade supports the following Ubuntu versions:
– Vivid (15.04)
– Utopic (14.04)
– Trusty (14.04 LTS)
• ROS Indigo supports the following Ubuntu versions:
– Trusty (14.04 LTS)
– Saucy (13.10)

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 ROS Installation
• If you already have Ubuntu installed, follow the
instructions at:
– http://wiki.ros.org/indigo/Installation/Ubuntu
– You can also download a VM with ROS Indigo Pre-
installed from here:
– http://nootrix.com/downloads/#RosVM
• Two VMs are available: one with Ubuntu 32Bits and
the other with Ubuntu 64Bits (.ova files)
• You can import this file into VirtualBox or VMWare

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 ROS Environment
• ROS relies on the notion of combining spaces using the
shell environment
– This makes developing against different versions of ROS or
against different sets of packages easier
• After you install ROS you will have setup.*sh files in
'/opt/ros/<distro>/', and you could source them like so:
$ source /opt/ros/indigo/setup.bash

• You will need to run this command on every new shell

you open to have access to the ros commands, unless
you add this line to your bash startup file (~/.bashrc)
– If you used the pre-installed VM it’s already done for you
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 ROS Basic Commands
• roscore
• rosrun
• rosnode
• rostopic

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 roscore
• roscore is the first thing you should run when
using ROS
$ roscore

• roscore will start up:

– a ROS Master
– a ROS Parameter Server
– a rosout logging node

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roscore

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 rosrun
• rosrun allows you to run a node
• Usage:
$ rosrun <package> <executable>

• Example:
$ rosrun turtlesim turtlesim_node

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 Demo - Turtlesim
• In separate terminal windows run:
– roscore
– rosrun turtlesim turtlesim_node
– rosrun turtlesim turtle_teleop_key

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Demo - Turtlesim

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 rosnode
• Displays debugging information about ROS nodes,
including publications, subscriptions and connections
Command
$rosnode list List active nodes
$rosnode ping Test connectivity to node
$rosnode info Print information about a node
$rosnode kill Kill a running node
$rosnode machine List nodes running on a particular machine

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rosnode info

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 rostopic
• Gives information about a topic and allows to
publish messages on a topic
Command
$rostopic list List active topics
$rosnode echo /topic Prints messages of the topic to the screen
$rostopic info /topic Print information about a topic
$rostopic type /topic Prints the type of messages the topic
publishes
$rostopic pub /topic type args Publishes data to a topic

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 rostopic list
• Displays the list of current topics:

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 Publish to ROS Topic
• Use the rostopic pub command to publish messages
to a topic
• For example, to make the turtle move forward at a
0.2m/s speed, you can publish a cmd_vel message
to the topic /turtle1/cmd_vel:
$ rostopic pub /turtle1/cmd_vel geometry_msgs/Twist '{linear: {x: 0.2, y:
0, z: 0}, angular: {x: 0, y: 0, z: 0}}'
– To specify only the linear x velocity:
$ rostopic pub /turtle1/cmd_vel geometry_msgs/Twist '{linear: {x: 0.2}}'

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 Publish to ROS Topic
• Some of the messages like cmd_vel have a
predefined timeout
• If you want to publish a message continuously use
the argument -r with the loop rate in Hz
• For example, to make the turtle turn in circles
continuously, type:
$ rostopic pub /turtle1/cmd_vel -r 10 geometry_msgs/Twist ‘{angular:
{z: 0.5}}'

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Publish to ROS Topic

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 Ex. 1
• Run the turtlesim node
• Send a command to turtlesim to move backwards
continuously at 5Hz rate

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